The box‐corer is meant to quantitatively sample afourth of a square meter of sediment.

Sven and Paulo have just finished preparing the box‐corer, spade opened, ready for deployment.

After a 4.5 km journey down to the seafloor, which takesabout 3 hours back and forth, the box‐corer brings us back a box full of sediments covered with nodules.

Then the rush and excitement set in. Pedro and Daniel are looking for fauna living fixed on nodules.

Meanwhile Ana is removing the overlying water, which isthen sieved by Lenka.

Once the overlying water, the nodules and their fauna havebeen removed, Lenaick is going to slice the sediment while bathing himself in the tropical sun, at an ambient temperature of about 30°C, nicely refreshed by a marinebreeze.

But down the seafloor, animals live at a temperature of about 0°C.

He thus gentlemanly passes on the sediment to Sarah andSteffi who will sieve it in the cold lab, at 0°C, in order tolimit the heat shock that would damage the animalsand their DNA.

Sieving is used to get rid of most of the fine particles while retaining the fauna we are interested in.

As soon as the sediment is sieved, Lenka and Paulo pickthe fauna up under a microscope.

Their interest is mainly in polychaetes. Some of them are still alive while Lenka and Paulo are imaging them.

The whole process takes about 3 hours, just in time toget ready for the next one, and yet the next one, until the end of the box‐coring day.